


Not Here

by lost_spook



Category: Level 7 (TV), Out of the Unknown
Genre: Angst, Community: fan_flashworks, Dystopia, Gen, Mental Disintegration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes seeing the truth of things is no help at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Here

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fan_flashworks challenge 'Anywhere But Here'.
> 
>  _Level 7_ is a 1966 episode of the BBC SF anthology, _Out of the Unknown_ , (from a book by Mordecai Roshwald). It should make sense without knowledge of the source, since I know it's obscure; it’s just a vignette of a particular moment/character that struck me for this prompt.
> 
> Please note: Mental breakdown, mentions of a nuclear apocalypse

Even here in the medical bay, the dispassionate voice of the tape recording broke into the far-away conversations around him. He wasn’t listening any more, but still they told him how lucky he was to be here on Level 7, Level 7, Level 7. Safe, and privileged – and buried four thousand five hundred feet below the earth.

There was something wrong with him that he didn’t see that his freedom was to be here, securely boxed away from that dead world above. He moved on the bed, as if trying to escape that thought. He saw the rockets falling inside his head every time he closed his eyes; they wouldn’t go away. But, no, that was the nightmare, wasn’t it? The world wasn’t dead – not yet; only to him, because he was here. There was something wrong with him. No one else saw Level 7 as their prison, or – he shivered – their tomb. Here on Level 7 they could end the world in safety. They were lucky, and he was ungrateful, he was unnatural.

They were trying to cure him of wanting not to be here. He didn’t see how they could. He didn’t think he cared. He was disappearing in his intense wish to be elsewhere, as he stared at the grey wall against the bunk on which he was lying. First his hand, and his arm, and then, why not everything? If he could cease to function entirely, it would solve the problem. 

Nothing made sense any more, but it was only his confusion; everyone else was unconcerned. He could not hold in his head the thought that they would follow the commands of a tape, a mere machine, and destroy the living, colourful world above with their poisonous, violent rockets, and their precious Level 7. No matter how many times he fed that through his brain, he couldn’t process it. He would not, he could not, press any more buttons. Pressing those buttons was an act of murder; the end of the world. He thought everybody knew destroying people was murder, but they didn’t seem to think so. They didn’t seem to think at all; they listened to a tape instead, a tape that played on and on without an end. 

The medical team were not unkind, although they kept their distance and rarely spoke to him, as if his upside-down ideas were infectious, radioactive. It would all be right again after the procedure, the nurse told him when she brought his rations. She smiled, but she was only a number, not a real person, like everyone else – except him. He had lost his name when they brought him down here, and now he had forfeited the number they had given him. He could hardly be here, could he, not if he was only a malfunctioning part of the machinery, a broken part without a label? 

It would all be right again, after the procedure.

And it was, for then he simply wasn’t there at all.


End file.
